With great power comes great responsibility! Not just for Spiderman, the statement is also very suitable for someone in leadership. From taking business-altering decisions to monitoring the workflows, business leaders have to juggle a lot of things on a daily basis. Are you one and do you want to make your life (work) easier? A robust task management platform is your solution and this is where Asana Task Manager enters into the picture.  

Asana Task Manager is an excellent platform that helps streamline workflows and keep tasks organized in one place. The platform is very functional, has some amazing features, and its an easy-to-use interface – all these plus points make it an excellent task management tool for both businesses as well as individuals looking to boost productivity and collaborate more efficiently with other professionals.

Want to know more about this amazing tool? This blog is all you need! The blog discusses all about Asana and helps you take a closer look at the many benefits that the platform offers and making it your go-to task manager. From discussing in detail about its benefits to giving you an easy-to-understand tutorial on how to use it, the blog discusses all – so let’s get started!

Asana Task Manager

Asana is a web-based task management platform that helps businesses and individuals keep track of their work. This is also very ideal for organizations to manage and monitor their teams, maintain transparency and keep track of the progress. What makes it even better is its ease of use! Asana is very easy to get started with and start using.

It has a simple, easy-to-use and appealing interface that lets managers or leaders assign tasks to themselves as well as their team members and get collaborate. Apart from assigning tasks, the platform also provides options to set deadlines, tag the tasks’ priority, and add attachments and comments. Another great option is customizability. It is possible to create tasks and sub-tasks, let collaborators see the activity on the task, and more. 

Is the Tool Free?

Well, here comes the best thing about Asana. The tool is absolutely free for individuals and small teams looking for basic project and task management. The basic plan is suitable for small businesses and teams to get started with project management.

However, there is a Premium version which comes at $10.99 per user per month (for annual payment). This version is an idea for larger teams that could benefit from advanced features such as unlimited dashboards, workflow builders, advanced search, and a dedicated admin console.

The platform has another version called the Business version. Priced at $24.99 per user per month (annual billing), this version offers advanced features on top of premium features. Some of them include integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, Salesforce, and Power BI.

In addition to all these, Asana Task Manager also has an Enterprise version.  This version, which has some advanced features, is developed for organizations that would want to scale the software across the organization.

And if you wish to know more about the plans, you can visit Asana’s official webpage.

Who is it for?

Asana Task Manager is for everyone who likes to enhance and streamline their project/task management. Teams specializing in sales, product launches, marketing campaigns, or planning and running sprints. It offers a wide variety of features and functionalities to support your team’s workflow.

Here’s a look at all the types of teams that can benefit from using Asana

1. Sales
2. Operations
3. Design
4. Product
5. Marketing
6. IT departments
7. Finance
8. Engineering
9. Event planners
10. Human resources

The tool suits almost all departments. So now, let us move to discussing in detail the brilliant features that Asana Task Manager offers.

Asana Task Manager: Features

Asana is packed with some excellent features that help keep track of work and get things done, and it also helps keep things transparent among teams.

Some of the features of Asana include –

• Tasks: Being a task management tool, Asana’s obvious feature is task creation and management. With Asana, you can create tasks, organize them into projects, and also share them with your team members. This will further help you get a better picture of what’s happening with the team and what the progress of the tasks is. This ultimately assists you in planning your work better.
• Goals: As business leaders and managers, you must be well-aware of the importance of setting clear and measurable goals. Along with being important, the task is also difficult. The goals have to be set in a way that they bring value to the team as well as the organization. Asana helps you with your Goals. Asana offers a dedicated place – Goals – where you can list down your company’s goals and the sub-goals. Having them all in one place makes them more accessible – anyone in the team can go back and refer to the goals when required. Additionally, this also helps track the progress of the goals.
• Timeline: In addition to creating tasks, Asana also lets you set deadlines and assign tasks to team members. Not just that, you can also set the view and see it as a Gantt chart. This helps you keep track of the progress, measure productivity and have an overall vision for a project.
• Portfolios: This is a great feature that is ideal for reporting purposes. Using this feature from Asana allows you to track high-level progress and share the same with the collaborators/ stakeholders.
• Workload: With Asana Task Manager, it is also possible for you to monitor the tasks of the rest of your team members. The tool lets you to monitor their tasks and progress on them. This information further helps in understanding the pace and plan a better work balance.
• Forms: Asana Task Manager also allows you to standardize without getting overwhelmed with a huge load of tasks. The platform allows you to do so using Forms.
• Automation: With Asana, you can bid bye to all the repetitive chores that seem simple but take up a lot of your time. Asana lets you let automate most of the repetitive tasks such as sending task-related emails. Additionally, you can also customize what you want to automate.
• Integration: Asana is also a master with integration. The platform can integrate well with several popular communication and productivity tools, such as Dropbox, Google Calendar, and Slack.

While all these features are great, you should be aware of the fact that not all the features offered by Asana are free. Some of these features are available for paid accounts.

Let us now talk about the benefits offered by the platform.

Asana Task Manager: Benefits

Just like the host of features, Asana also offers a plethora of benefits for organizations that use it. Let us discuss some of the notable features –

• Helps avoid duplication: On Asana, there is a lot of transparency as everybody with access to the projects or tasks can see who’s working on what. The users can also see when a particular task is due, and what its priority is. As all these details are available on the tool, and can be viewed by the entire team, it is easier to avoid duplication and prevent task overlapping.
• Offers better flexibility: The platform integrates well with some of the best productivity tools available such as Dropbox, Slack, and Google Drive. With the integration, it is much easy and more convenient to share data and files to and from Asana.
• Reminds users via emails: The software platform also sends emails to users to notify and remind them of the tasks they are entitled to. They also get emails when there’s a comment on their task, or whenever they are tagged. This way, everyone on the team stays informed and accountable.
• Helps set priorities right at the start: With Asana, you can set the task priorities in the beginning itself. This helps keep the communication clear. This will further lead to proper time management.
• Accommodates diverse needs: This is another notable benefit of the tool. The tool allows the admin to make customizations to fit the needs of their team. The fields, color-coded tags, views, and reports, everything can be customized.

Asana Task Manager: Getting Started

Asana Task Manager is a go-to platform used by several global organizations including NASA, Airbnb, Spotify, etc, and benefit from it. Well, you too must be wondering how to get started with it… the good news is that getting started with Asana takes barely 15 minutes and here’s how to do it –

The very first step is to create and set up your count on Asana.

Choose how to collaborate                                                           

When creating the account, you can choose how you wish to collaborate with your peers. For this, you have two options – Organization and Workspace. If you are an individual trying to collaborate with other professionals, then you can opt for the workspace option. On the other hand, if you are an organizations wanting to collaborate with the rest of your team members with the same professional email domain Organizations is the option for you.

Create a team

After choosing how to collaborate, your next step is to create your team. If you’ve selected the Workspace option, you can avoid this step. However, if you’ve created an Organization, your next step will be to create a team so you can go ahead with task and project management. While setting up a team is the next step in organizational hierarchy, you might have to set up different teams for different departments.

Create a project

After creating teams, you can proceed to create a project. When creating a project, you will have to keep in mind that the project doesn’t belong to the whole organization, but to a particular team. Therefore, the project has to be created under the team and it is the project that houses the team’s data, members, and tasks.

Asana projects help you stay organized. Asana offers a wide variety of ready-to-use templates to get you started. For instance, if you are heading the operations team, you can select Asana templates for standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.

Organize project with tasks

The next step, after setting up the project, you should start creating tasks and subtasks that help in fulfilling the project milestones. You can create tasks, assign it to members, and even add additional details to provide more context. This also helps make sure that all information at one place.

Refine your workflow

Your next step is to start creating a plan on how to get things done – i.e., you have to start building your workflow. You can make good use of Asana’s views feature – you can select between list view, board view, timeline view, or calendar view. Based on the view selected, you can gain different perspectives on the project. For instance, you can use the timeline view and can see the project as a Gantt chart. This view helps you visualize the relationships and dependencies between different tasks.

Customize the platform to suit your needs

Finally, you can get to customizing the task management platform with custom automations, fields, and other elements that can help your team optimize work and stay on track.

To gain a better understanding and how to get started with the platform, you can access their dedicated onboarding tutorial.

Asana Task Manager: Integrations

With integrations, it is possible to connect to other tools, which will further help make it easy to share information and collaborate. Asana integrates with a host of tools and applications. Some of the popular integrations include –

1. OneDrive
2. Google Drive
3. Dropbox
4. Box
5. Gmail
6. Outlook
7. Slack
8. Zoom

What Can be Better in Asana Task Management

While we can vouch that Asana is a great tool for project and task management, there are certain aspects that can help make the platform the best for current day organizations.

One feature that makes it even better is that the platform doesn’t offer built-in tracking. The feature to track and measure helps make it easier to gauge the team’s productivity and plan the workflows better.

At the same time, the availability of too many features and too many details can be overwhelming for smaller teams that are working on basic projects.

Wrapping Up

On the whole, Asana is an excellent tool that helps make task and project management easy. Its easy to use interface, advanced features, and reasonable pricing make it a go-to tool for organizations. While the platform has scope for improvement, especially for dynamic projects, it is still one of the best in the market.

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